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| Melody Maker August 8, 1981 The Second Coming by Colin Irwin Be it ice hockey internationals, royal weddings, or lovemaking, there's a cloud that's constant — the curse of the brilliant debut. The better the first effort, the more urgent it becomes to improve and/or surprise; even to match the first effort is inevitably deemed insufficient. It's a fact of life the Pretenders must now be bitterly ruing. Eighteen months ago they offered a defiantly determined clarion call for the launch of the Eighties with a stunning album of raging beauty that quickly perched itself arrogantly on top of the album charts in tandem with the missionary single from it, "Brass In Pocket." It and they were deservedly lauded for amalgamating the angry, aggressive tradition of rock with aching tenderness and pain. These qualities remain intact on the second album — there's a vulnerability about Chrissie Hynde's vocals and lyrics, for example, that frequently rips open your heart. And a couple of tracks — "Birds Of Paradise" and "Waste Not Want Not" — outstrip anything on the first. Yet... an air of disappointment hovers each time I reach the end of side two (despite the exuberant, triumphant blaze of the "Louie Louie" finale). It's the feeling of deflation that invariably comes from extreme anticipation; the relentless harshness that occupies so much of this record (particularly side two) and the unremittingly desperate, twisted nature of so much of the material. "We're all of us in the gutter...we fall but we keep getting up," sings Chrissie on "Message Of Love," and it evokes the mood of the entire album. Cold, harsh, and desolate, every time she opens her mouth you expect the earth to shudder. The band surround her with grim-faced stridency: stark and brutal. Charged, emotive, and intensively effective, but light entertainment it ain't. Opening track "The Adultress," a quirky, ugly portrait over a violent guitar backdrop, sets a harrowing mood that's cemented by "Bad Boys Get Spanked," a raucous diatribe against regimentation and preconditioning, full of sexy undertones. Both are fearsomely powerful, but later on we're into tracks like "Day After Day" and "Jealous Dogs," which continue the furious ardour without their attendant depth, and the patience begins to snap. It's frustrating, for when the anguish is unforced, with every nerve end exposed as on the softer, reflective "Birds Of Paradise," then they are more compelling (and appealing) than ever. It works well, too, on the expected Ray Davies song, "I Go To Sleep," which is given a pained serenity — while you already know all about "Message Of Love" (which still sounds like a classic) and "Talk Of The Town." "Pack It Up" is alternatively intimidating and wry, offering a rare glint of humour with its opening McEnroe cry of "You guys are the pits of the world," and spitting through its own jaundice..."I don't like your trousers...your appalling taste in women...your insipid record collection," roars Chrissie at some anonymous makeweight with cruel scorn. The whole terse collection suddenly, unexpectedly explodes on the final track, "Louie Louie," which isn't the song you think, but a new Hynde number set to a tune approximating "Midnight Hour." It brazenly flaunts its own derivativeness as if in parody of the whole rock 'n' roll charade (perhaps also reflected in the sleeve's imitation of the first Stones' album cover). Whatever the motives, it's a welcome show of joy in a hard, depressing work. This isn't the backlash, but it's not easy to love an album that strains so hard to be overtly unattractive. |
| Rolling Stone October 1, 1981 Chrissie Hynde Wants To Be Rock & Roll's Number One Heroine by Tom Carson Pretenders II is likely to put off a lot of people. It lacks the brittle drive of the debut album, and the loaded sexual provocation. It's less single-mindedly focused. And yet it's a record to exult over — passionate, recklessly engaged and, in some ways, far richer than its predecessor. The reason is simple: Chrissie Hynde. The key to the Pretenders' music has never been their music. The band's sound is distinctive but mostly for its archness, and the playing doesn't evoke much except a nervousness as random as fingers drumming on a table. Nor is Hynde, by any formal yardstick, a great singer: her pitch is dubious, her ability to sustain a melody questionable. What counts is her ability to project herself as a personality, to turn herself into the heroine of her own life and make it compelling to the big audience. This is what great rock & rollers have always done. On the first LP, Hynde's personality was based almost entirely upon her sexuality, which, as a stratagem, worked sensationally. Pretenders was so charged that listening to it was like having to watch your girlfriend get it on with another man. Yet sex gave this artist an inside track on themes that even Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell had treated only under the guise of romance. For Chrissie Hynde, sex was an endless journey — a will to power and a search for faith, the real war in all human relations. Pretenders was often cheap and tawdry, but to Hynde, tawdriness was where the meat was, and the best way to put across her truths. Much of the debut album's feverish energy also came from Hynde's feral ambition: few rockers find it so crucial to justify themselves by making their mark in public. Few rockers, too, depend as deeply on having succeeded at becoming a star as Hynde does on Pretenders II. Her new sense of place — fame is the home she's always looked for — grants her new authority: she can explore herself in a more complex manner than ever before and send out fresh messages. But though the subjects may be somewhat different, the trip goes on. Chrissie Hynde's basic role is that of an adventuress. She's a pop descendant of the Faustian heroines in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels, and of the expatriate seekers in Henry James', and she instinctively exploits the part's mythic and/or trashy overtones even as she rebels against being trapped by its stereotypes. All of the record's separate motifs — love and sex; the dislocation of stardom, freedom and exile — dovetail into that double game. Still, sexual relationships are the LP's main theme: more painful, adult versions than the cocky power ploys of Pretenders. The deflations of the first album's "Up the Neck" were pure strut, but the lyricism of "I laughed in my bed/At the stupid things you said," in Pretenders II's "Birds of Paradise," is an authentic recapturing of lost time. Acting out a fantasy of the ultrafree modern woman, Hynde is trapped between her paradoxically old-fashioned morality and her pride that the new life she's chosen is better and braver than the alternatives. The very excess of "The Adultress" (sic) suggests how strongly felt the guilt is, yet in the same situation in "Jealous Dogs," she's just as passionately defending herself against the rabble at the door. Every cut is made vivid by Hynde's intense desire to give voice to the meanings of her experience — a gift she now extends outside herself as well. What's so wonderful about "Talk of the Town," for example, is how beautifully she grasps the rapturousness of success: she's the girl who got left behind, but she's also the boy who's changed his place in the world, and we understand them both. "Pack It Up" succeeds where fifty other put-downs of Hollywood hustlers don't, first because it's hilarious, then because there's a great rant in the middle — about finding new lovers and enemies — that comes right from the heart of Hynde's questing nature. As a singer, Chrissie Hynde only pretends to be outspoken — emotionally, she's the most elusive of vocalists. If the mood turns vulnerable, her voice will go tight with scorn. Or, in the middle of a harsh passage, she'll be unexpectedly, breathily tender. Her singing is a series of brilliant defense mechanisms: the self-protection of someone who was fundamentally an innocent but had to learn too many tricks to ever trust sincerity completely again. Hynde's constant shifting captures her ambiguities perfectly, just as the music's jittery rhythms jell into context — that arch nervousness, after all, is what the lyrics are all about. The star's edgy rhythm guitar defines the search at the center of each number, while the band provides the bash and clatter needed to spur the singer on. Pretenders II does have its flaws. Chrissie Hynde's obsessive approach often impels her to deal in the trashiest pop terms, and sometimes she can't rise above them. A title like "Bad Boys Get Spanked" seems meant to be contemptuous of people who'd find such as idea arousing, but the song doesn't always make that clear. And a couple of tunes — "Louie Louie," for instance — though winning, don't quite come off. But this is a brave record and a good one: the fiercely ambitious work of a woman determined, by whatever means, to make herself the greatest heroine in the history of rock & roll. The odds are certainly against her. I hope she makes it. (Rating: 4 stars = Excellent) |
